trunk of a tree

When the substance of a composition, trunk of a tree, is by Truth sustained,
Style aids it to branch into leafy boughs and bear fruit.
Indeed, feeling and expression should never fail to correspond,
As each emotional change wears a new complexion on a sensitive face.
Thought that swells with joy bursts into laughter;
When grief is spoken, words reverberate with endless sighs;
No matter if the work be accomplished in one flash on the page,
Or is the result of the most deliberate brush.

—Lu Chi (261- 303), “The Working Process,” Essay on Literature (translated by Shih-Hsiang Chen), Anthology of Chinese Literature: from early times to the fourteenth century (Grove Press, 1965), edited by Cyril Birch. [This essay was written in rhymed-prose and was composed three years before Lu Chi was executed during a power struggle of the Chin court.]

inventing a new language

In a letter to Frank O’Hara (August 18, 1965), Robert Motherwell wrote a series of aphoristic statements regarding art, artists and art-making. The intent of these statements was to spur O’Hara to get started on the catalog essay for a Motherwell retrospective at MOMA which O’Hara was curating: “…when the deadline for his catalog essay arrived, O’Hara developed writer’s block. Motherwell, who had experienced many such an impasse in his painting and writing, sent O’Hara a battery of his random thoughts, written in a single morning, hoping that one of them might ignite a spark. Against the objection of the artist, who felt his thoughts had been written for private purposes, O’Hara published Motherwell’s letter in the exhibition catalog.” From The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (Oxford U. Press, 1992), edited by Stephanie Terenzio, and here is a selection of Robert Motherwell’s remarks from the letter:

Only painters and sculptors, among artists, can be exposed in toto in a few minutes—or seem to be.

The content has always to be expressed in modern terms: that is the basic premise. Joyce understood that perfectly.

The greater the precision of feeling, the more personal the work will be.

The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one’s feeling precisely.

What paintings can stand up against the physical presence of nature? Few, and often least of all those who have nature as the principal subject.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others! What a choice?

The drama of creativity is that one’s resources, no matter how unusual, are inadequate.

Irony, the greatest necessity of everyday life, does not work in pictures. (Neither does pathos.)

There is something princely about even the most democratic artists.

One does not have to “understand” wholly to feel pleasure.

If life was longer one could express more. Since it isn’t, stick to the essentials.

The beauty of another being’s presence.

Some children quit painting if they haven’t the proper color. Picasso says, you just use another color. Who’s right?

The supreme gift, after light, is scale.

What better way to spend one’s life than to have, as one’s primary task, the insistence on integrity of feeling? No wonder others are fascinated by artists.

Moments of joy make existence bearable: who ignores joy is immoral.

The material things of life are mere decorations. Enough space, light, and white walls make any environment workable.

The world cannot endure that artists’ money comes from so much pleasure.

The surrealist group used to demand a picture each year from its painters: the proceeds were used to support their poets. They recognized the social injustice in the fact that a great painting has more commodity value than a great poem and equalized the situation. No one objected.

To modify one’s art is to modify one’s character. An artist whose work develops represents character growth, either slow and steady, like a garden, or in leaps…

The problem is to seize the glimpse.

The ethic lies in not making the glimpse presentable.

If one paints on an enormous scale, one gets involved in all the problems of running a lumberyard.

The beauty of Europe is that sculpture is everywhere. The sculpture doesn’t have to be great to function perfectly in the landscape, humanizing it.

America is what the poor people of Europe invented, given means enough and time. Europeans therefore shouldn’t snub it.

The only thing that I bought in Greece (1965) was a scale-model of a Homeric ship.

From my writings, it would seem that I am more interested in poetry than painting, which of course is not at all true. It is that the poets have speculated much more in words about what “the modern” is.

The interest in language so dominant in modern art is not an interest in semantics per se: it is a continual interest in making language (whatever the medium) to fit our real feelings better, and even to be able to express true feelings that had never been capable of expression before.

I love Hopkins’s insistence on particularization.

Barnett Newman for years has said that when he reads my writings he learns what I have been reading, but when he wants to know what I am really concerned with at a given moment, he looks at my pictures. He’s right.

To have the discipline to shut up, and just paint the pictures!

bodily function

I don’t write until I feel a physical necessity to commit a feeling or a notion to text. Writing as a bodily function.

note for a new year

There is nothing like a new poem.

under the hood

Emotion being the poem’s motor.

touching bottom

Written in letters that could touch bottom.

made with feeling

Joan Mitchell:

“I carry my landscapes around with me.”

“Painting is made with feeling. One has to have the guts to feel and love outside oneself.”

“The solitude that I find in my studio is one of plenitude. I am enough for myself. I live fully there.”

[Quotes I copied off cards at the Joan Mitchell retrospective exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Arts]

not human

Poetry’s feelings are not human feelings; we know the difference. There is some deep exchange of heat for cool that I’m trying to get at, something that I see operating in nonsense and that I believe gives poetry much of its secret irresistibility and staying power (we are not exhausted by it and must always revisit it).

—Kay Ryan, “A Consideration of Poetry,” Synthesizing Gravity (Grove Press, 2020)

[I don't believe this a bit. But I must acknowledge other views re poetry.]

feeling it

Critic, never be too smart to feel.

feel this

Art on that borderline of kitsch: Are you not a feeling human being? Are you not a thinking human being?

exposed and open

In order to understand art, one must be exposed to art in as many of its manifestations as possible, and then one must be open to those varied experiences, in order to develop a true and abiding feeling for art.

floated promiscuously along

The difference, then, between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of a cultivated but not naturally poetical mind is that in the latter, with however bright a halo of feeling the thought may be surrounded and glorified, the thought itself is still the conspicuous object; while the poetry of a poet is Feeling itself, employing Thought only as the medium of its utterance. In the one feeling waits upon thought; in the other, thought upon feeling. The one writer has a distinct aim, common to him with any other didactic author; he desires to convey the thought and he conveys it clothed in the feelings which it excites in himself, or which he deems most appropriate to it. The other merely pours forth the overflowing of his feelings; and all the thoughts which those feelings suggest are floated promiscuously along the stream.

—J. S. Mill, “The Two Kinds of Poetry,” Essays on Poetry (U. of South Carolina Press, 1976), edited by F. Parvin Sharpless

precise and reticent

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us.

—Wei T'ai, Poems of the Late Tang (NYRB Classics, 2008), A. C. Graham, translator.

emotional memory

Recalling the way a work of art made me feel is often more durable than other kinds of memory. I can often remember how I felt when I read a novel, for example, without having a good recollection of its plot. What remains after looking at a painting is not an exact imprint of the image in the mind, but rather the feeling it gave me, a feeling that I sometimes must struggle to name because emotions as experienced in the body are often cruder than the words we assign to them. Visceral responses to an image, however, are inevitably avenues to meaning. It isn’t always clear why a picture affects us the way it does, but for me, pursuing that mystery is the single most fruitful way to discovery. As Henry James once wrote, “In the arts, feeling is meaning.”

—Siri Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)

created an equivalent

I simply function when I take a picture. I do not photograph with preconceived notions about life. I put down what I have to say when I must. That is my role, according to my own way of feeling it. Perhaps it is beyond feeling.

What is of greatest importance is to hold a moment, to record something so completely that those who see it will relive an equivalent* of what has been expressed.

[…]

I want solely to make an image of what I have seen, not of what it means to me. It is only after I have created an equivalent of what moved me that I can begin to think about its significance.

Shapes, as such, do not interest me unless they happen to be an outer equivalent of something already taking form within me. To many, shapes matter in their own right. As I see it, this has nothing to do with photography, but with the merely literary or pictorial.

—Alfred Stieglitz, quoted by Dorothy Norman in Alfred Stieglitz (The History of Photography Series, Aperture, Inc., 1976).

*After 1922 Stieglitz used the term "Equivalents" to describe his photographic series of clouds.

not embarrassed

Millay has been overlooked by the critics of our time until very recently. Two new biographies have ushered in an era in which, I trust, Millay will be brought back into the light she deserves. In all my undergraduate and graduate courses in the seventies and eighties, she was never mentioned, but The Collected Poems, a hardback, given to me by my father one Christmas when I was in college, has been on the shelf by every desk at which I have ever written a word. When I read “Renascence”—her juvenilia, really—I am not embarrassed, either for her or for me. She was learning how to write and I was learning how to read. We started thinking big. We knew, or thought we knew, that for a women’s writing to be taken seriously, we should aim for the “universal,” and what is more universal than all the human cries that ever cried? It is not a sin to overwrite. That is another thing she taught me: not to be embarrassed by large feeling, and not to be embarrassed to let your reader know of that large feeling.

—Robin Behn, “In the Music Room,” Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande Books, 2003), edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen.

refuge for the real

Poetry as the last refuge for those still possessed with a feeling for what is real.

phrasally compounded

Phrases, rather than clauses, must be the units of expression. This was Blake’s mode of choice in most of his work, from The French Revolution through Jerusalem.

[…] Sentences were more phrasally compounded, less clausally complex than ever before or since. Nouns and adjectives, in natural consequence, strongly dominated verbs and took over verb meanings. Sounds, like sentences, stressed not limits, periods, bounds, and conclusions as regular feet, line forms, rhymes, and stanzas would do, but rather interior units and correspondences, in echo and onomatopoeia. Reference stressed the objects and qualities of such sensory concern, the scenes, atmospheres, and feelings which could be onomatopoetized, the natural and human items of emotional description with their minor and parallel actions of observation and acceptance.

We may think Blake as too active, rebellious, and eccentric to use such material; yet we find it basically his. What additions he made to it were…not so much changes as extensions of the basic material. He increased the characteristic reference to color, scope, and feeling; he increased human anatomizing, scenic atmosphere, and passive and expressive verbs. He used a fuller load of substantives and descriptive declaration, and a freer play of interior sound. He liked what he had, and carried it further in its own realm.

—Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes In English Poetry (U. of California Press, 1957)

no inert fact

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald Sherburne (The Free Press, 1978, p. 310), lecture delivered in 1927.

memory poems

I know a few poems by heart. And I feel a few in my gut.